Leadership Bite – How did you make your staff feel today?

April 24, 2019

The concept

How people feel at work is a significant determinant of their motivation, energy and discretionary effort. And how people feel at work can be significantly affected by the impact their boss has on them in daily interactions. So thinking about those interactions –one-on-one catch-up sessions, team meetings, setting them up on project tasks etc – what sort of impact did you have? Did they leave that interaction with positive feelings described in the info-visual or did you inadvertently generate inverse feelings?

Why it’s useful

Bringing to a level of consciousness about the impact, as a leader, that you have on your staff heightens your awareness in your day-to-day interactions. This helps you to modify, add or eliminate behaviours – it might be what you say, how you say it, what you do and your body language. This provides an opportunity to become the best version of yourself as a leader.

How/when to apply it

The
set of questions set out in the info-visual can be both a planning tool and a
reflection tool.

As
a planning tool you can, prior to a interaction with a staff member or your
team, identify which of these particular questions you want to achieve a
resounding ‘yes’ on. This will enable
you to focus and plan your interaction.

As
a reflection tool you can choose to actively reflect on an interaction after
the event: How did I make them feel?
What worked? What didn’t? What did I learn? What will I do differently next time?

It
is apt to think of the T.S. Elliot quote here: we had the experience but we missed
the meaning!

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